Mila ranks at #198 with 545 entries, and the name has done something that very few pet names manage: it climbed the SSA baby chart faster than the pet leaderboard. Mila is a current top-30 girls' name in American baby naming, which means most pet Milas are sharing the name with a kid down the block.
The baby-name-first crossover
Most pet names that match popular baby names — Bella, Charlie, Luna — got popular as pets first or rose alongside babies. Mila is unusual in that the baby chart climbed first (the name jumped into the SSA top-100 around 2014 and into the top-30 by 2019), and pet adoption has lagged but followed. Compare with Luna, which followed the inverse pattern.
One counter-reading: a smaller share of Mila pet owners are picking the name for actress Mila Kunis (visible since 1998's That '70s Show) rather than for the contemporary baby-name resonance. Both inputs land on the same name; the demographic of the owner differs more than the choice itself.
Sound and breed fit
The two-syllable shape (MEE-lah) features the same open-A ending that Luna, Nova, and Lola work, and the recall projection is excellent. Mila lands across small companions, mid-sized retrievers, and cats at near-average rates, with a slight bias toward female puppies whose owners want a contemporary name without venturing into rare territory. The Mila baby name page shows the trajectory, one of the fastest-rising girls' names of the 2010s. Owners cross-shopping similar names often pick between Mila, Luna, and Nova based on which sound fits their household best, and the three names produce roughly similar breed-and-species distributions across pet adoption cohorts.